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Comedy and Indigenous Survivance in the Music of Keith Secola

William D. J. Rees

Abstract

This essay argues that Keith Secola’s music evidences survivance through its comedic discussion of what it means to be Indigenous within the modern US. Examining two of Secola’s most popular songs, “NDN Kars” (1992) and “Fry Bread” (1996), and through an author’s interview with Secola, this essay investigates how humour demonstrates survivance through the versatility of Indigenous peoples and cultures.

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1. Introduction

  • 1 Simon Frith, “Music and Identity,” in Taking Popular Music Seriously: Selected Essays, edited by Si (...)

Music constructs our sense of identity through the direct experiences it offers the body, time and sociability, experiences which enable us to place ourselves in imaginative cultural narratives.
Simon Frith, “Music and Identity” (1996)1

  • 2 Christina Rose, “Keith Secola Gets Humble for the Muse,” Indian Country Today, Sept. 13, 2018, http (...)

1How do you articulate experiences like US imperialism from Indigenous perspectives? How can anyone discuss this in any way that begins to redress injustices without simply inflicting more pain? Indigenous artists, speaking to the experiences of their communities, do discuss these experiences and often use emotional languages of culture, such as music and comedy, to do so. Of a rock opera he wrote (Seeds), Anishinaabe (specifically Ojibwe) artist Keith Secola once remarked, “You have to write with a sense of humor,” and described his writing criteria as being: “One, is it entertaining? Two, is it philosophical? Three, is it spiritual in nature? And four, is it metaphysical in nature, so people can draw their own meaning to it?”2 His music can be reflective of the past and educative in looking to future generations, but for Secola, comedy is a useful method of initially engaging people with its messages.

  • 3 B. Norrell, “Keith Secola: ‘Backwards Like a Sacred Clown,” Indian Country Today, July 28, 2004, ac (...)
  • 4 Keith Secola, “NDN Kars,” on K. Secola, Circle (AKINA Records, CD, 1992); Keith Secola, “Fry Bread, (...)

2This article argues that Secola’s music evidences survivance through its comedic discussion of what it means to be Indigenous within the modern US. Because of its discussion of shared cultural references and issues, Secola’s music is widely popular with audiences across the many different Native nations, particularly on the rez (reservation) music circuit.3 Examining two of Secola’s most popular songs, “NDN Kars” (1992) and “Fry Bread” (1996), and drawing on my interview with Secola, this article investigates how humour demonstrates survivance through the versatility of Indigenous peoples and cultures.4 These songs are fun, but also contain deeper meanings for listeners to contemplate. Even though they can poke fun at Indigenous peoples, this is done in a knowing manner, as Secola is himself Indigenous. Alongside humour, they inspire cultural pride and spread education of tragic histories that may be difficult to discuss in other ways.

  • 5 Gerald Vizenor, “Aesthetics of Survivance,” in Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence, edited by (...)
  • 6 Vizenor, Survivance, 1.
  • 7 Gerald Vizenor, Native Liberty: Natural Reason and Cultural Surivivance, (Lincoln and London: Unive (...)

3This article uses Gerald Vizenor’s theory of survivance as one way of interpreting Secola’s comedic folk-rock songs. Survivance asserts that Indigenous peoples are able to resist the narratives of dominant societies through their own cultural practices and innovation.5 Vizenor defines it as “an active sense of presence over absence, deracination, and oblivion; Survivance is the continuance of stories, not as mere reactions, however pertinent. Survivance is greater than the right of a survivable name.”6 Survivance contradicts the longstanding Euro-American stereotype of ‘the dying Indian’ through vitality. It is expressed culturally through “songs, stories, natural reason, remembrance, traditions, customs, and [is] clearly observable in narrative sentiments of resistance.”7 Survivance is not just survival, but also resisting and flourishing. Music is one way in which it can be expressed. As ethnomusicologist Liz Przybylski has written of Indigenous artists:

  • 8 Liz Przybylski, “Indigenous Survivance and Urban Musical Practice,” Revue de recherche en civilisat (...)

Presenting their own creative musical practices, they demonstrate to audiences that music can and does change with the times without losing connections to the expressive culture of the past. Social forces have created voluntary and involuntary cultural changes over time; ongoing musical practices demonstrate a long line of Indigenous musical survivance.8

4This research draws upon online interviews I conducted with the music artists Keith Secola, Danielle Egnew and Raye Zaragoza for my Master by Research thesis in 2018. These interviews discussed popular culture as a medium that has perpetuated stereotyped misconceptions of Indigenous peoples, but also as a medium in which Indigenous peoples have shaped their own cultural narratives. I am immensely grateful to these artists for their shared insights into Indigenous survivance through contemporary music.

2. Native Americans and the US

  • 9 Francis Walker, The Indian Question, (1874), 17.
  • 10 Christian Dippel, “Forced Coexistence and Economic Development: Evidence from Native American Reser (...)

5The historical experiences of Indigenous nations with the US have been broadly traumatic. The US has existed as a nation-state since 1776, and it has had periods of friendly relations, conflict, and outward abuse towards different Native American nations. The experiences of various Native American peoples have varied, but generally by the latter half of the nineteenth-century, many Americans such as the US commissioner of Indian affairs, Francis Walker, regarded “national progress” as the seizure and commercial development of Indigenous lands by settlers, to which he considered Native Americans a natural “obstacle.”9 Successive nineteenth-century administrations had a simple and brutal answer to this: the confinement of Indigenous peoples on reservations. These had originated in the 1850s in the US, following the annexation of Texas (1845), Oregon (1846), and California (1848), allowing state governments, as economics scholar Christian Dippel has observed: “to maximize the amount of land that could be freed up for settlement and to be able to easily monitor Native Americans once they were on the reservation.”10 This effectively imprisoned Native Americans, often on poor quality land that was unsuitable for agriculture, and made them dependent upon imposed modes of living for sustenance.

  • 11 Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West, (New York: Holt. (...)

6Despite continuous resistance, Indigenous peoples were pressured to comply by US administrations which, if any treaties had been made at all, rarely upheld treaty obligations that had been agreed with Indigenous nations, and which passively allowed settlers to take Indigenous lands, if not actively supporting them with military force. In his seminal revisionist book on how the US treated Native Americans in the late nineteenth-century, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, historian Dee Brown describes the motivations for the genocide and forced relocation of these peoples as “violence, greed, audacity, and an almost reverential attitude toward the ideal of personal freedom for those who already had it”.11

  • 12 Lee Irwin, “Freedom, Law, and Prophecy: A Brief History of Native American Religious Resistance,” A (...)
  • 13 Steve Talbot, “Spiritual Genocide: The Denial of American Indian Religious Freedom, from Conquest t (...)

7Some Americans, however, did have more nuanced motivations. Many European settlers believed that Native Americans could only survive if they became culturally ‘modern’ (meaning culturally white), and this resulted in an agenda of assimilation into US society which involved policies aimed at suppressing Indigenous customs. The Rules for Indian Courts (1882) directed Indian agents and missionaries to actively suppress religious activities on reservations, with punishments ranging from the withholding of rations to imprisonment.12 The Indian Religious Crimes Code (1883) and the issuing of Circular 1665 (1922) by government officials reiterated that Indigenous peoples engaging in their traditional religious practices should be harshly punished.13

  • 14 R. David Edmunds, “Native Americans, New Voices: American Indian History, 1895-1995,” The American (...)
  • 15 D. Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928, (...)
  • 16 This phrase is attributed to General Richard H. Pratt, who argued that in educating Indigenous chil (...)

8While the assimilation of Indigenous peoples had paternalistic motivations, it also served the purpose of removing Indigenous opposition to the commercial exploitation of their lands by US society. Historian R. David Edmunds has summarised the US government’s rationale as being that “Indian people would accept their individual land holdings and would be completely assimilated. Native Americans, as a separate and unique ethnic minority group, would essentially disappear.”14 In this line of thinking, Native Americans could survive, but only if they removed all sense of their cultural identities. To eliminate these identities, the US set up its assimilative education program, the American Indian boarding schools.15 In the US, these were run by the state, rather than by churches, like in Canada. The strategy was soon coined as killing “the Indian in the child,” and it was practiced by the removal of Native children from their families during their formative years.16 At these schools, children were taught US culture and to be ashamed of their ancestry.

  • 17 Suzan Shown Harjo, “American Indian Religious Freedom Act after Twenty-Five Years: An Introduction, (...)
  • 18 P. C. Smith and R. Warrior, Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee, (N (...)

9By the latter half of the twentieth-century, Native Americans were loudly challenging these policies. Since the 1960s, many Native Americans have put pressure on the US to give them greater self-determination. The American Indian Religious Freedom Act (1978) was significant in making persecution of Indigenous peoples for religious cultural practices illegal.17 In the 1970s, the Red Power movement campaigned for greater recognition of Indigenous sovereignty and against the mistreatment of Indigenous peoples.18

  • 19 Nicholas G. Rosenthal, Reimagining Indian Country: Native American Migration and Identity in Twenti (...)
  • 20 Elizabeth Rich, “‘Remember Wounded Knee’: AIM’s Use of Metonymy in 21st Century Protest,” College L (...)

10Like many radical political movements during this period, organisations within it often strategically pursued news coverage, realising that militant actions attracted attention. Some of the most notable of these were the reoccupation Alcatraz Island (1969-1971), in which activists claimed to be retaking lost land in San Francisco Bay, the march on Washington (1972), in which they protested the violation of treaties, as well as AIM (American Indian Movement) members occupying the Bureau of Indian Affairs, that being the administrative branch of the US which manages Native American issues.19 AIM actions also included the armed standoff at Wounded Knee (1973), the area where Native Americans had been massacred by the US military almost a hundred years earlier, and where activists stood off against the US military.20 All these events brought increasing public attention to the mistreatment of Native Americans.

  • 21 Cindy Barbosa, “The Occupation of Alcatraz Island: Roots of the American Indian Movement (1969-1971 (...)
  • 22 Vine Deloria Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto, (Norman: Oklahoma University Pres (...)

11Indigenous activism in this period often had a deliberately comedic edge in seeking to highlight the absurdities of American society. In taking Alcatraz Island for instance, activists claimed to be following the white man’s precedent in purchasing Manhattan by offering $24, glass beads and red cloth for the entirety of the island.21 In his Indigenous activist classic, Custer Died for Your Sins, Vine Deloria Jr. noted humour as a galvanising force in radical politics, writing, “Humor has come to occupy such a prominent place in national Indian affairs that any kind of movement is impossible without it […] Often people are awakened and brought to a militant edge through [humour]”.22

  • 23 Dances with Wolves (1990), [Film] Dir. Kevin Costner, USA, Tig Productions and Majestic Films Inter (...)
  • 24 Sherman Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, (New York: Harper Perennial 1993); S (...)
  • 25 Reel Injun (2009), [Film], Dir. Neil Diamond, Canada, Rezolution Pictures; National Film Board of C (...)
  • 26 Michelle Raheja, Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty, and Representations of Native (...)

12In the 1990s, there was revaluation of how Native Americans were presented in Hollywood movies. While Dances with Wolves (1990), Last of the Mohicans (1992), and Pocahontas (1995) were flawed in their representations of romanticised ‘Indians,’ they did begin to represent Native American characters as humans with relatable attributes.23 Indigenous filmmakers also began to make an impact. Notably, Smoke Signals (1998), based on the debut short story collection of Sherman Alexie (Spokane), The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, was the first Hollywood film to have its producers, director, screenwriter, technicians, and main cast all be Indigenous to North America.24 As Nēhiyaw filmmaker Neil Diamond has suggested in his documentary about screen representations of Native Americans, Reel Injun (2009), Smoke Signals was groundbreaking in not only being the first Hollywood movie to be directed by an Indigenous person, director Chris Eyre (Cheyenne/Arapaho), but also because it portrayed Native Americans as modern characters, rather than as historical warriors, such as in the Western films of the 1950s.25 As Michelle H. Raheja notes in her analysis of Native Americans in film, Reservation Reelism (2010), increasingly in the twenty-first century, Native American film makers “are interrogating the powers of the state, providing nuanced and complex forms of self-representation, imagining a futurity that militates against the figure of the vanishing Indian, and engaging in visual sovereignty on virtual reservations of their own creation.”26

  • 27 Beverly R. Singer, Wiping the War Paint off the Lens: Native American Film and Video, (Minneapolis (...)
  • 28 Apocalypto (2006), [Film] Dir. Mel Gibson, USA and Mexico, Touchstone Pictures and Icon Productions (...)

13Anthropologist and director Beverly R. Singer has described Indigenous filmmaking as a practice of “cultural sovereignty” which involves “trusting in the older ways and adapting them to our lives in the present […]” “By making our own films […],” Singer writes, “Native Americans threaten traditional practices of Hollywood filmmakers, who often advanced their careers by creating distorted and dishonest images.”27 Simultaneously, whilst the technology to make and distribute their own self-determining films has proliferated, mainstream Hollywood films like Apocalypto (2006), Avatar (2009) and Moana (2016) have continued to draw upon tropes of savagery and/or romanticisation and environmentalism in portraying Indigenous peoples on screen, although with more nuanced characters and consultation of Indigenous communities than in previous decades.28

  • 29 “S.J.Res.14 - A Joint Resolution to Acknowledge a Long History of Official Depredations and Ill-Con (...)
  • 30 R. Capriccioso. “A Sorry Saga: Obama Signs Native American Apology Resolution; Fails to Draw Attent (...)
  • 31 Joanne Barker, “Self-Determination,” Critical Ethnic Studies 1, no. 1 (2015): 11-26, 11.
  • 32 Ibid., 23.

14Perhaps the closest the US has come to an official acknowledgement of responsibility towards historical mistreatment of Native Americans was in 2009. As part of a defence appropriations spending bill, President Barack Obama signed an apology “on behalf of the people of the United States to all Native Peoples for the many instances of violence, maltreatment, and neglect inflicted on Native Peoples by citizens of the United States.”29 Some Indigenous peoples felt the apology lacked sincerity however, as little effort was made to draw attention to it, limiting its impact on both Native Americans and the wider American public.30 It was also a general apology for past actions, lacking government culpability, and made no effort to resolve current disputes of sovereignty with Native Americans. Essentially, the relationship between the US and Native Americans has been historically unequal, with the US taking Indigenous lands and attempting to eradicate Native American cultures. While Native Americans have made some gains in sovereignty and self-representation since the mid-twentieth century, the US has not begun a significant discussion of how its relationship with Indigenous nations can be reconciled. As activist scholar Joanne Barker asserts, “Arguably neither international nor national authorities within the United States seem to adhere to their own mandates respecting the self-determination of Indigenous peoples.”31 Barker argues that meaningful sovereignty is not just about “inclusive equality but an anticolonial resurgence of Indigenous rights.”32

  • 33 Jolene Rickard, “Diversifying Sovereignty and the Reception of Indigenous Art,” Art Journal 76, no. (...)
  • 34 Ibid., 82.
  • 35 Dylan Robinson, “Public Writing, Sovereign Reading: Indigenous Language Art in Public Space,” Art J (...)

15Sovereignty, as understood by Indigenous artists however, is not necessarily dependent upon settler society’s legal system—especially considering that that legal system has often failed to uphold their rights within it. Historian and artist Jolene Rickard has stated that growing up among the Tuscarora, she comprehended sovereignty as “direct action.33 For Rickard, “The idea of our art serving Indigenous communities reinforced my understanding that sovereignty is more than a legal concept.”34 Indigenous studies scholar Dylan Robinson has similarly written that “Sovereignty is not a thing, but an action; it is a form of doing.”35 Sovereignty, understood in this way, can be an expression of art and culture.

3. Methods of Survivance

  • 36 Robert Berkhofer Jr., The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Pr (...)
  • 37 Kenneth Lincoln, Indi’n Humor: Bicultural Play in Native America, (New York and Oxford: Oxford Univ (...)

16Given its violent history of colonisation and armed warfare, US settler society has long stereotyped Indigenous peoples as being perpetually solemn whilst assigned to a tragic extinction.36 This stereotype positions doomed Native Americans, allegedly unable to understand the sophisticated subtleties of humour anyway, as having nothing to laugh about. Vizenor’s concept of Indigenous survivance contradicts this stereotype by demonstrating how Native Americans have continued to survive and thrive through humour. In his 1993 book, Indi’n Humor, Kenneth Lincoln observes the persisting stereotypes of the imagined ‘Indian,’ including “the noble savage, the ‘poor Indian’, the stoic warrior, the libidinous princess, the dogged squaw, the medicine witch, the cigar-store totem, the tearful ecologist, and the rainmaking shaman.”37 What all of these stereotypes share is the misconception that Indigenous peoples are humourless. Indigenous peoples, in reality, are not only capable of comedy, but can be hysterically funny. Country artist Danielle Egnew, who has Tsalagi (Cherokee), Lakȟóta (Teton Sioux) and European heritages, explained to me in a 2018 interview:

  • 38 Author’s 2018 interview with Danielle Egnew.

Contrary to what we see in the 1950s movies, y’know, ‘me very serious Native American!’ […] the native tribes are hilarious. Humour is a huge part of the native tribes, and they will poke you with a stick and tease yah. And that’s probably why they thought white people were so weird, because white people would get super offended, and [the Indigenous peoples] they’re all like, ‘we’re joking with yah, what’s wrong with you? Laugh!’38

  • 39 Lincoln, Indi’n Humor, 3.
  • 40 David Moore, That Dream Shall Have a Name: Native Americans Rewriting America, (Lincoln and London: (...)

17Humour has also played a role in discussing the traumas of historical and ongoing settler colonialism. As Lincoln adds in Indi’n Humor, Indigenous peoples have not survived hundreds of years of colonisation by passively “casting themselves as victims” or “lamenting dispossession under the banner of Manifest Destiny.”39 Humour is an ongoing form of survivance. A method through which Indigenous peoples have processed hardships, mocked the contradictions of US society, and poked fun amongst themselves.40 As language scholar David Moore points out, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, US settler society expected the supposed ‘dying Indian’ to adapt to white ways of living (i.e. to stop practicing their own cultures) or face extinction in what was conceived as a Darwinian contest of races in which Euro-American peoples considered themselves superior. Indigenous peoples’ continued existence, Moore asserts, can be seen as one big joke by Native Americans, and the punchline is that they are a constant reminder of the contradictions of America’s supposedly revolutionary ideals of universal liberty:

  • 41 Ibid., 301.

The vanishing Indian stereotype and narrative function as the rationale to cover up the reality not only of ongoing Native nations but equally of stolen land as the foundation of America; thus the fact that Indians never vanished means that America is and was always already a failure in its own values of freedom and justice for all. How ironic! Ha! Ha!41

  • 42 Kate Morris and Linda Morris, “Camping Out with Miss Chief: Kent Monkman’s Ironic Journey,” Studies (...)
  • 43 Smoke Signals.

18As stated, Indigenous humour can highlight the contradictions of how America’s nation-building mythic past does not fit with the reality of violently colonising a continent.42 North America was, and still is, populated by many civilisations that have existed since long before Europeans arrived on the continent. Native American humour can expose this fact, as well as fundamental differences with US culture. One character quips to the protagonists leaving the Schitsu’umsh (Coeur d’Alene) reservation in the classic Native American film Smoke Signals (1998), “You guys got your passport?” because entering the US is “as foreign as it gets.”43

  • 44 John W. Troutman, Indian Blues: American Indians and the Politics of Music, 1879-1934, (Norman: Uni (...)
  • 45 Alice Fletcher, Indian Story and Song from North America, (Book Garden 2022), 5.
  • 46 J. R. Johnson, “Why They Call American Music Ragtime,” The Black Perspective in Music 4.2, (July 19 (...)
  • 47 Philip Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places, (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas 2004), 197.

19Indigenous peoples simply producing music is, in itself, an act of anticolonial survivance. To the anthropologists from settler society who recorded it, the music of different Native American nations was expected to die out as Indigenous peoples either assimilated into to white culture or perished. Anthropologists of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries generally considered Indigenous music as an aspect of an earlier stage of civilization and not something that was compatible with modernity.44 As Alice Fletcher commented in her book Indian Story and Song from North America (1900), “These songs are like the wild flowers that have not yet come under the transforming hand of the gardener.”45 Or, as one musicologist put it as recently as 1976, “The Indian is a morbid race, and morbid people are not musical.”46 Indigenous music has traditionally been appropriated and given associations of backwardness in US-American culture, such as via tom-tom beats signalling ‘Indian’ ambushes in Western films.47 Modern Indigenous music such as Secola’s, just by existing, disproves these myths.

  • 48 Charity Marsh, “‘Don’t Call Me Eskimo’: Representation, Mythology, and Hip Hop Culture on Baffin Is (...)

20Music, as with any form of culture, is a means through which Indigenous artists can construct their own narratives. Musicologist Charity Marsh has written that Inuit artists utilise hip-hop to challenge “common stereotypes and reified identities that continue to circulate in political, cultural, and national discourses.”48 Musicologists Jeff Berglund, Jan Johnson and Kimberli Lee have also noted that Indigenous artists have incorporated and innovated upon musical cultures that originated outside their communities as a means of discussing contemporary issues, writing,

  • 49 Jeff Berglund, Jan Johnson and Kimberli Lee, “Introduction,” in Indigenous Pop: Native American Mus (...)

Native people have adapted and adopted Western languages and instrumentation into their cultures, and now put them to use to further Indigenous issues. And Native folks have, in effect, “indigenized” these entities, inventing new ways, Native ways, to employ music and songs in many popular genres to convey Native thought and concerns in song.49

  • 50 Kimberli Lee, “Heartspeak from the Spirit: Songs of John Trudell, Keith Secola, and Robbie Robertso (...)

21Lee has, further, written of musicians including Keith Secola, “They are addressing important issues that concern Native people today, issues that should concern every American citizen. But beyond that, these works function as texts of Native literature and should be given serious consideration.”50

4. “NDN Kars” (1992)51

  • 51 Secola, “NDN Kars.”
  • 52 Author’s 2018 interview with Keith Secola.
  • 53 Secola, “NDN Kars”; S. Schulman, From Kokopellis to Electric Warriors: The Native American Culture (...)
  • 54 Dance Me Outside (1994), [Film] Dir. Bruce McDonald, Canada, Yorktown Productions; Shadow Shows; Ci (...)

22Indigenous musicians have expressed survivance not only through music that is directly serious in its tone, but also by incorporating humour. Keith Secola blends comedy and serious subject matter, such as the topics of racism, land claims, cultural property rights, and imprisonment. He has won multiple Nammys (Native American Music Awards) and describes his music, if pushed to label it, as “Native Americana,” drawing inspiration from folk artists like Bob Dylan and Woodie Guthrie.52 His most popular song, “NDN Kars” (Indian cars), has achieved anthem status within the Native American music world.53 Although penned years earlier (in the late 1970s or the early 1980s, depending on the retelling), it catapulted his career when it featured in the film Dance Me Outside (1994), a film that in itself, incorporates Indigenous humour alongside serious subject matter.54

  • 55 Dance Me Outside; P. Krawec, Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagin (...)
  • 56 “Missing and Murdered”; Cher, “Half-Breed,” (MCA Record, LP, 1973).
  • 57 Cher, “Half-Breed.”

23In Dance Me Outside, a young girl from a reservation is murdered, and the white man who committed the crime receives a light prison sentence. This injustice relates to similar real-world events in which Indigenous women in the US and Canada are abducted at high rates.55 In Dance Me Outside, the perpetrator is eventually released from prison, and the plot follows the differing responses of friends of the girl he killed. Girls in the community are seemingly more interested in campaigning for a retrial, while the boys plot the perpetrator’s murder. Despite dark themes of injustice towards Indigenous peoples and revenge, the film breaks the tension with comedy, and music is sometimes part of this. There is one moment when the boys are being escorted to a police station in a patrol car for questioning, despite not having committed a crime, and they loudly sing Cher’s 1973 single, “Half Breed.”56 The song is about a girl who is mocked by both white and Indigenous people, because she had a dual biological heritage from each. The irony of these Indigenous boys, arrested for a crime they did not commit, singing this song is funny because it shows a self-awareness of US society’s biases against them. This is made funnier by the wailing of Cher’s chorus of “half-breed!”57 This short joke carries plot significance too, as by underscoring the biases of the police towards Indigenous peoples, and the boys’ awareness of this, helps explain why these young Indigenous boys would be resentful towards ‘the system’ and feel that they have to take matters of justice into their own hands.

  • 58 “Rez Car,” accessed June 5, 2022, https://www.urbandictionary.com/.
  • 59 Author’s 2018 interview with Keith Secola.
  • 60 J. Ross-Pilkington, “Mass Incarceration and Police Violence in Native American Communities,” Roosev (...)

24Secola’s “NDN Kars,” which plays before the film’s credits, similarly contributes to a distinctive sense of self-awareness in Native American identities. Secola demonstrates survivance through mixing deeper meanings with comedy and cultural pride. He uses the object of the rez car, which refers to aged, dysfunctional cars that are often found on Native American reservations across the US.58 In my 2018 interview with Secola, he explained that these have been mocked, saying, “Where I grew up in Northern Minnesota, the term Indian cars was almost like a derogatory term where people were snide and would laugh and would stereotype it with negative connotations.”59 What Secola does in this song is to flip the meaning and to turn the rez car, despite its rundown state, into a symbol of Indigenous pride. The song follows the explanation of an Indigenous person whose car has been pulled over by a police officer, a relatable situation to Indigenous peoples given that there is widespread police discrimination towards them in the US.60 Its opening lyrics are:

  • 61 Secola, “NDN Kars.”

I’ve been driving in my NDN car.
The sound of the wheels drumming in my brain.
The dash is dusty, the plates are expired.
Please Mr. Officer, let me explain.
I got to make it to a powwow tonight.
Singin’ forty-nines down by the riverside.
Lookin’ for a sugar, ridin’ in my NDN car.61

  • 62 Ibid.

25The driver comedically conforms to the ‘Indian’ stereotype in order to wrangle his way out of trouble with the police, stating excuses for speeding like, “I’ve got to make it to a powwow tonight, I’ll be singing forty-nines [a form of storytelling singing heard in the evening and night time forty-nine communal dances at powwows], down by the river side.”62 “NDN Kars” takes US stereotypes of ‘Indians’ and turns them into a performative alibi in the narrator’s attempt to receive leniency. As ethnomusicologist Liz Przybylski has observed,

  • 63 Liz Przybylski, “Indigenizing the Mainstream: Music Festivals and Indigenous Popular Music,” Journa (...)
  • 64 Ibid.

Native performances are able to “cannibalize” the limited figures of ‘Indians’ in pop culture, chewing them up in a practice of sovereignty.63 In this way, creative, even destructive, misuse of stereotypes becomes inverted, and creates wholly different power relations. In the face of ongoing challenges, musicians are responding with expressions of sonic sovereignty—an embodied practice of Indigenous self-determination through musical expression.64

  • 65 Ibid.
  • 66 Elyse Carter Vosen, “‘We Need More Than Love’: Three Generations of North American Indigenous Prote (...)

26There is a meta-interpretation of the song in that as with the narrator, Secola is himself inventively reworking cultural expectations of the ‘Indian’ to innovate his own narrative, thus expressing “sonic sovereignty.”65 As ethnomusicologist Elyse Carter Vosen has observed of Indigenous artists, “A common thread among indigenous protest artists of all generations is a relentless creativity. Such a drive to create results in agility, resourcefulness, an enormous sense of initiative.”66 When Indigenous peoples are confronted with settler colonialism such as that embodied by a police officer, constructing one’s own cultural narratives is essential for survival. For the protagonist of “NDN Kars,” survival is simultaneously rooted in distinctive traditions and creative adaptability.

  • 67 D. Purdy, “Resistance and Existence: North American Indigenous Humour of the 21st Century,” Emergin (...)

27It also creates a sense of shared modern Indigenous identity through the common experiences of rez cars and police discrimination. But it is more than solely being an affirmation of identity in reaction to the discrimination of settler society. The repairs holding together the rez car and the quick-talking response of the driver to the officer are metaphorical of the Indigenous capacity to innovate and survive in difficult situations. Indigenous listeners will remember that they and their ancestors have survived hardship, in part through their creativity. The song itself is a literal example of this Indigenous capacity for innovation. As sociologist Daisy Purdy has observed, “Indigenous humour focused on the ridiculousness of dominant generalizations of Native identity facilitates the public emergence of contemporary Indigenous identity.”67 The song likewise creatively reworks cultural memories of difficulty, and not only because memory is important as a means of respect for what came before, but also because it can be innovated into serving a function for facing the challenges of the present. In the song’s case, to be aware of past and ongoing poverty and discrimination but not to despair at it, to be proud of Indigenous identities, and also simply to laugh.

  • 68 K. Lee, “Heartspeak From the Spirit: Songs of John Trudell, Keith Secola, and Robbie Robertson,” St (...)

28Indigenous survivance is further emphasised by sound. “NDN Kars” opens with a powwow beat and the guitar’s main riff uses the musical scale of Native American forty-nine singing, where vocal notes are bent as they are held.68 It works into the humour of the lyrics by being unmistakably Indigenous, adding to the sense of the narrator conforming to a stereotype for the police officer. At the same time, however, the powwow beat alongside the forty-nine riff is uplifting and gives a proud, anthemic feel to its folk-rock storytelling. Forty-nine singing holds significance to these listeners as music performed at powwow gatherings where different Indigenous nations come together as a social community.

  • 69 Secola, “NDN Kars.”
  • 70 Ibid.
  • 71 Ibid, accessed June 10, 2024, https://secola.com/home.
  • 72 Author’s 2018 interview with Keith Secola.

29Much of the humour comes from the self-depreciating description of how completely rundown the narrator’s car is, and the miracle that it keeps on functioning in any capacity. The “dash is dusty” and its “plates are expired,” “the radiator steams,” and “one headlight don’t work.”69 Despite all the car’s faults, there is an underlying pride to the way Secola sings about it. He addresses Indigenous peoples with the plural “we,” talking of flying down highways in Indian cars, where “we don’t get old, we just get younger.”70 This presents the rez car as joyful for Indigenous peoples and their communities as connected by literal and metaphorical highways. Even if their cars are rundown, there is a sense of survivance in them still belonging to Indigenous peoples. This can allude to an appreciation of the things that Indigenous peoples still have despite past and ongoing settler colonialism. Despite the historical efforts of settler society to erase Native Americans from the continent, Secola is voicing an appreciation of what persists, even if it they face socioeconomic inequalities. A sticker that says “NDN Power” is said to be what holds the car together and that can be interpreted as the determination of Indigenous peoples, as well as a belief in higher power.71 The car is a metaphor for Indigenous peoples and reservations, and how, despite often being in poverty, they are proud and know what matters in life. As Secola put it in our interview: “The song is about the richness of being poor.”72

5. “Fry Bread” (1996)73

  • 73 Secola, “Fry Bread.”
  • 74 Secola, “NDN Kars.”
  • 75 Author’s 2018 interview with Keith Secola.
  • 76 Secola, “Fry Bread.”

30As evidenced in “NDN Kars,” Secola achieves a deliberately comedic effect through his use of symbolism in his songs.74 He has explained that while his songs often have serious meanings, he also wants them to be entertaining, “as not to alienate people with over truth,” adding that “You’ve kinda got to use metaphor, real codes.”75 Serious subjects such as historical and ongoing injustices towards Indigenous peoples could come across as emotionally exhausting for audiences or even difficult to discuss at all. The codes that he uses to get around this can take humorous forms and the way in which they are performed can contribute towards this. The live performance of “Fry Bread” (1996), for instance, taken literally, is a song about a traditional Indigenous food and the ridiculous lengths Native Americans will go through to eat it without suppression.76 Secola has elaborated on its deeper meaning, referring to the US’ cultural persecution of Indigenous customs:

  • 77 Author’s 2018 interview with Keith Secola.

I kind of use it as a modern protest. When I do it live, I’ll say… ‘A long time ago fry bread was illegal, and you couldn’t eat it, or you couldn’t speak of it and you couldn’t see it, or eat it. And so, people got together, and gathered illegally and sang songs into the night, in the dark forests the sound of heathen rhythms can be heard until the morning light.’ But the idea of a little bit of a historical thing, using this code.77

  • 78 Ibid.
  • 79 James Bryant, “State Secret: North Carolina and the Cherokee Trail of Tears,” Journal of American I (...)
  • 80 Louis Owens, Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place, (Norman: University of Oklahoma (...)
  • 81 Randy Woodley, Becoming Rooted: One Hundred Days of Reconnecting with Sacred Earth, (Augsburg Fortr (...)
  • 82 L. Erdrich, The Chippewa Landscape of Louis Erdrich, (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999 (...)
  • 83 Paula Gunn Allen, Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions, (Boston: Beacon Press, 198 (...)

31Secola then takes the joke further, saying, “I talk about the Fry Bread Laws and the Trail of Grease. These are metaphors for some awful laws in the history of America, the Trail of Tears… and then the Indian Removal Act.”78 The Indian Removal Act (1830) removed many Native American peoples from their homelands so that their lands could be claimed by white settlers. A consequence of this was the Trail of Tears (1830-1850).79 This was the ethnic cleansing of lands, where some Indigenous peoples were forcibly removed to the west, sometimes at gunpoint, resulting in thousands of deaths along the way from exposure, disease. and starvation.80 Secola’s music is effective in discussing this history without being so emotionally direct as to upset audiences. Considering that over five centuries of Europeans on the North American continent have seen warfare, disease and dispossession of Indigenous peoples’ lands, survivance through comedy is a method of articulating such injustices.81 As Anishinaabe (specifically Ojibwe) author Louise Erdrich has stated: “clearly [for Indigenous peoples] humour both targets and takes some fatal sting out of history.”82 Humour articulates that which may be difficult to articulate. Poet and Indigenous activist Paula Gunn Allen once wrote, “Certainly the timeframe we inhabit has much that is shabby and tricky to offer; and much that needs to be treated with laughter and ironic humor; it is the spirit of the trickster-creator that keeps Indians alive and vital in the face of horror.”83

  • 84 Secola, “Fry Bread.”
  • 85 Author’s 2018 interview with Keith Secola.
  • 86 Ibid.
  • 87 Ibid.

32The song works for some Native American audiences because of its relatable cultural reference to fry bread while pointing out the absurdity of US settler colonialism when applied to food. As Secola repeats at the end of the verses: “All I’m asking for. Fry bread.”84 It seems a simple request. Secola explained in our interview, “The metaphor is the fry bread is what’s native in our Indigenous culture and people.”85 There is also an element of Indigenous pride. Fry bread is an Indigenous cuisine that Indigenous peoples enjoy, and the joke is that, like their cultures more generally, they love this food so much that they have historically gone to great lengths to have it, despite people trying to take it away from them. In his live performance of the song, Secola has said that he and his band “get people involved from the community audience, to kinda use theatre, and re-enact like they’re a piece of fry bread, and they’re laying down taking a nap, and making the fry bread rise.”86 This embodied engagement ensures that Secola’s band and the audience are not left at, in his words, “a point of misery,” balancing its message with a sense of fun that engages the community.87 This method uses music to entertainingly communicate violent histories in a playful way.

  • 88 Author’s 2018 interview with Raye Zaragoza.
  • 89 Secola, “NDN Kars”; Secola, “Fry Bread.”
  • 90 Leila El Shennawy, “The Making of Fry Bread,” Reader’s Digest Canada, Feb. 5, 2024, https://www.rea (...)
  • 91 James J. Donahue, Contemporary Native Fiction: Toward a Narrative Poetics of Survivance (New York a (...)

33Another folk artist, Raye Zaragoza, whose multinational heritage includes O’odham, commented in a 2018 interview with me, “Music really has a way of reaching people […] making people listen when sometimes words aren’t enough […] [it] lifts up the voices of people who are otherwise silenced.”88 Like “NDN Kars,” “Fry Bread” is a song for the people.89 In one version of it, Secola sings, “You can’t do much with sugar, flour, lard and salt. But you can add one fundamental ingredient. Love.”90 It articulates the fact that Indigenous communities may have humble ingredients within them, but they retain what is really important—that being connections to each other. This includes the connections of generations across time. As a defiant anthem of survivance, “Fry Bread” interlinks the experiences of ancestors to those in the present and future.91

6. Conclusion

  • 92 Michelle Raheja, Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty, and Representations of Native (...)

34In Reservation Reelism, Michelle Rahija observes that visual sovereignty in Indigenous film employs slightly different tactics to the legal or outright political sphere of asserting sovereignty, “Because visual sovereignty arbitrates in the broader world of Indigenous sovereignty and is not always directly involved in political debates that determine Native American survival and livelihood—as legal sovereignty in the U.S. and Canadian justice systems is—there is more room for narrative play.”92 The same could be written of sonic sovereignty when songs are analysed as serious, yet also deeply funny, texts. While it might sometimes do so more indirectly, such cultural narratives can be powerful assertions of survival and resistance. Art is a fluid and creative form of discussion, and one that can bypass the courts, terms, and political institutions developed during the settler colonial expansion of the United States.

  • 93 Secola, “NDN Kars”; Keith Secola, “Fry Bread.”
  • 94 Drew Taylor, “Introduction,” in Me Funny, edited by Drew Taylor, 1-3 (Vancouver, Toronto and Berkel (...)
  • 95 Ian Ferguson, “How to be as Funny as an Indian,” in Me Funny, 123-132, 128.

35Songs like “NDN Kars” and “Fry Bread” are effective for Indigenous listeners because they cleverly rework cultural information.93 Drew Taylor has written of Indigenous comedy, “Humor requires intelligence. It calls for the ability to take in information, deconstruct it and reconstruct it in a new, improved, refined format. The humorist then reintroduces that information to the world to achieve a completely different reaction.”94 Secola does this, reworking cultural references into entertaining, coded messages about serious issues. Ian Ferguson has also written of Indigenous comedy that, “The point of Our Jokes is to tell the truth. The humor is less directed outward, towards the dominant culture, than it is focused on the specificity of the Aboriginal way of life […] the day-to-day stuff that really constitutes a culture.”95

  • 96 Author’s 2018 interview with Keith Secola; R. Wells, Life Flows On in Endless Song: Folk Songs and (...)
  • 97 Przybylski, “Indigenizing the Mainstream,” 11.
  • 98 Author’s 2018 interview with Keith Secola.

36This corresponds with Secola’s desire to make music for the “common man,” which is embedded in the folk music and Anishinaabe oral storytelling traditions whose legacies he continues.96 They embody sonic sovereignty, a sense of sovereignty not solely confined to the legal processes of US settler society, but also as expressed through the arts.97 In Secola’s music, sovereignty can be found in the narratives we construct about ourselves and the world around us. As a folk storyteller speaking to the experiences of ordinary people, he observes “the richness of being poor.”98 That despite the experience of settler colonialism, including the attempted erasure of their peoples and cultures, there is a self-defining freedom and integrity to being Indigenous in the contemporary United States.

  • 99 Vizenor, “Aesthetics of Survivance,” 1.
  • 100 Author’s 2018 interview with Keith Secola.

37Survivance is characterised by “an active sense of presence over absence,” and Secola’s music humorously achieves this by articulating Indigenous identities through relatable cultural references such as the rez car and fry bread.99 These references are, however, coded metaphors for more serious messages. Comedy enables Secola to talk about and raise awareness of historical and ongoing settler colonialism that is so serious that it may be too upsetting and enraging for Indigenous audiences to discuss in another manner. As forms of communication, music and comedy enable listeners to think and feel whilst also having fun. As Secola told me: “I think humour is a valuable tool […] in storytelling because it’s entertaining […] People can laugh and then they can come to their own conclusions and draw that real understanding and deeply understand it.”100

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Notes

1 Simon Frith, “Music and Identity,” in Taking Popular Music Seriously: Selected Essays, edited by Simon Frith, 293-312 (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 309.

2 Christina Rose, “Keith Secola Gets Humble for the Muse,” Indian Country Today, Sept. 13, 2018, https://ictnews.org/.

3 B. Norrell, “Keith Secola: ‘Backwards Like a Sacred Clown,” Indian Country Today, July 28, 2004, accessed April 19, 2024, https://web.archive.org/.

4 Keith Secola, “NDN Kars,” on K. Secola, Circle (AKINA Records, CD, 1992); Keith Secola, “Fry Bread,” on K. Secola, Wild Band of Indians (AKINA Records, CD, 1996).

5 Gerald Vizenor, “Aesthetics of Survivance,” in Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence, edited by Gerald Vizenor, 1-23 (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 1.

6 Vizenor, Survivance, 1.

7 Gerald Vizenor, Native Liberty: Natural Reason and Cultural Surivivance, (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 85.

8 Liz Przybylski, “Indigenous Survivance and Urban Musical Practice,” Revue de recherche en civilisation américaine 5, (2015): 1-14, 11.

9 Francis Walker, The Indian Question, (1874), 17.

10 Christian Dippel, “Forced Coexistence and Economic Development: Evidence from Native American Reservations,” Econometrica 82 (2014): 2131-2165, 2136.

11 Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West, (New York: Holt. Rinehart & Winston, 1970), xv.

12 Lee Irwin, “Freedom, Law, and Prophecy: A Brief History of Native American Religious Resistance,” American Indian Quarterly 21, no. 1 (1997): 35-55, 36.

13 Steve Talbot, “Spiritual Genocide: The Denial of American Indian Religious Freedom, from Conquest to 1934,” Wicazo Sa Review 21, no. 2 (2006): 7-39.

14 R. David Edmunds, “Native Americans, New Voices: American Indian History, 1895-1995,” The American Historical Review 100 (1995): 717-740, 718.

15 D. Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928, (Lawrence: University of Press of Kansas, 1995).

16 This phrase is attributed to General Richard H. Pratt, who argued that in educating Indigenous children, the ideal policy would be to ‘kill the Indian in him, and save the man.’ Richard H. Pratt, “The Advantage of Mingling Indians with Whites,” in Isabel Barrows, (ed), Proceeding of the National Conference of Charities and Correction, 45-59, (Boston: Press of Geo. H. Ellis, 1892), 46

17 Suzan Shown Harjo, “American Indian Religious Freedom Act after Twenty-Five Years: An Introduction,” Wicazo Sa Review 19, no. 2 (2004): 129-136.

18 P. C. Smith and R. Warrior, Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee, (New York: The New Press, 1997).

19 Nicholas G. Rosenthal, Reimagining Indian Country: Native American Migration and Identity in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 134.

20 Elizabeth Rich, “‘Remember Wounded Knee’: AIM’s Use of Metonymy in 21st Century Protest,” College Literature 31, no. 3 (2004): 70-91, 71.

21 Cindy Barbosa, “The Occupation of Alcatraz Island: Roots of the American Indian Movement (1969-1971),” University of Wisconsin-Madison: The Nonviolence Project, Dec. 6, 2024, https://thenonviolenceproject.wisc.edu/.

22 Vine Deloria Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto, (Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 1988), 147.

23 Dances with Wolves (1990), [Film] Dir. Kevin Costner, USA, Tig Productions and Majestic Films International; Last of the Mohicans (1992), [Film], Dir. Michael Mann, 20th Century Fox; Pocahontas (1995), [Film], Dirs. Mike Gabriel and Eric Goldberg, Disney Studios.

24 Sherman Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, (New York: Harper Perennial 1993); Smoke Signals (1998), [Film] Dir. Chris Eyre, USA, Miramax.

25 Reel Injun (2009), [Film], Dir. Neil Diamond, Canada, Rezolution Pictures; National Film Board of Canada.

26 Michelle Raheja, Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty, and Representations of Native Americans in Film, (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press 2010), 240.

27 Beverly R. Singer, Wiping the War Paint off the Lens: Native American Film and Video, (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press 2001), 2.

28 Apocalypto (2006), [Film] Dir. Mel Gibson, USA and Mexico, Touchstone Pictures and Icon Productions; Avatar (2009), [Film], Dir. James Cameron, USA, 20th Century Fox, Dune Entertainment, Ingenious Film Partners and Lightstorm Entertainment; Moana (2016), [Film], Dir. John Musker and Ron Clements, USA, Walt Disney Animation Studios.

29 “S.J.Res.14 - A Joint Resolution to Acknowledge a Long History of Official Depredations and Ill-Conceived Policies by the Federal Government Regarding Indian Tribes and Offer an Apology to All Native Peoples on Behalf of the United States,” (2009-2010), accessed July 1, 2024, https://www.congress.gov/.

30 R. Capriccioso. “A Sorry Saga: Obama Signs Native American Apology Resolution; Fails to Draw Attention to it,” Indian Country Today, Jan. 13, 2010, https://indianlaw.org/node/529.

31 Joanne Barker, “Self-Determination,” Critical Ethnic Studies 1, no. 1 (2015): 11-26, 11.

32 Ibid., 23.

33 Jolene Rickard, “Diversifying Sovereignty and the Reception of Indigenous Art,” Art Journal 76, no. 2 (2017): 81-84, 81.

34 Ibid., 82.

35 Dylan Robinson, “Public Writing, Sovereign Reading: Indigenous Language Art in Public Space,” Art Journal 76, no. 2 (2017): 85-99, 85.

36 Robert Berkhofer Jr., The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present, (New York: Vintage Books 1979), 3; Paul Chaat Smith, Everything You Know About the Indian is Wrong, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2009), 20.

37 Kenneth Lincoln, Indi’n Humor: Bicultural Play in Native America, (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 3.

38 Author’s 2018 interview with Danielle Egnew.

39 Lincoln, Indi’n Humor, 3.

40 David Moore, That Dream Shall Have a Name: Native Americans Rewriting America, (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2013), 308.

41 Ibid., 301.

42 Kate Morris and Linda Morris, “Camping Out with Miss Chief: Kent Monkman’s Ironic Journey,” Studies in American Humor 6, no. 2 (2020): 265-284, 283; Kliph Nesteroff, We Had a Little Real Estate Problem: The Unheralded Story of Native Americans in Comedy, (New York: Simon & Schuster 2021), 4.

43 Smoke Signals.

44 John W. Troutman, Indian Blues: American Indians and the Politics of Music, 1879-1934, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press 2012), 6.

45 Alice Fletcher, Indian Story and Song from North America, (Book Garden 2022), 5.

46 J. R. Johnson, “Why They Call American Music Ragtime,” The Black Perspective in Music 4.2, (July 1976), 260-264, 260.

47 Philip Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places, (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas 2004), 197.

48 Charity Marsh, “‘Don’t Call Me Eskimo’: Representation, Mythology, and Hip Hop Culture on Baffin Island,” MUSICultures: The Canadian Journal for Traditional Music, (2010): 110-129, 112.

49 Jeff Berglund, Jan Johnson and Kimberli Lee, “Introduction,” in Indigenous Pop: Native American Music from Jazz to Hip Hop, edited by Jeff Berglund, Jan Johnson and Kimberli Lee, 3 - 16 (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press 2016), 7.

50 Kimberli Lee, “Heartspeak from the Spirit: Songs of John Trudell, Keith Secola, and Robbie Robertson,” Studies in American Indian Literatures 2, no. 19 (2007), 89-114, 110.

51 Secola, “NDN Kars.”

52 Author’s 2018 interview with Keith Secola.

53 Secola, “NDN Kars”; S. Schulman, From Kokopellis to Electric Warriors: The Native American Culture of Music, (1st Books, 2002), 92.

54 Dance Me Outside (1994), [Film] Dir. Bruce McDonald, Canada, Yorktown Productions; Shadow Shows; Cineplex Odeon Films.

55 Dance Me Outside; P. Krawec, Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future, (Minneapolis: 1517 Media; Broadleaf Books, 2022), 110.

56 “Missing and Murdered”; Cher, “Half-Breed,” (MCA Record, LP, 1973).

57 Cher, “Half-Breed.”

58 “Rez Car,” accessed June 5, 2022, https://www.urbandictionary.com/.

59 Author’s 2018 interview with Keith Secola.

60 J. Ross-Pilkington, “Mass Incarceration and Police Violence in Native American Communities,” Roosevelt Institute, Nov. 3, 2017, https://www.cornellrooseveltinstitute.org/.

61 Secola, “NDN Kars.”

62 Ibid.

63 Liz Przybylski, “Indigenizing the Mainstream: Music Festivals and Indigenous Popular Music,” Journal of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music 11, no. 2 (2021): 5-21, 11.

64 Ibid.

65 Ibid.

66 Elyse Carter Vosen, “‘We Need More Than Love’: Three Generations of North American Indigenous Protest Singers,” in The Routledge History of Social Protest in Popular Music, edited by Jonathan C. Friedman, 263-278 (New York and London: Routledge, 2013), 269-270.

67 D. Purdy, “Resistance and Existence: North American Indigenous Humour of the 21st Century,” Emerging Indigeneity, edited by in M. Harris, M. Nakata and B. Carlson, 258-274 (Sydney: UTS ePRESS, 2013), 260.

68 K. Lee, “Heartspeak From the Spirit: Songs of John Trudell, Keith Secola, and Robbie Robertson,” Studies in American Indian Literatures 19, no. 3 (2007): 89-114, 103.

69 Secola, “NDN Kars.”

70 Ibid.

71 Ibid, accessed June 10, 2024, https://secola.com/home.

72 Author’s 2018 interview with Keith Secola.

73 Secola, “Fry Bread.”

74 Secola, “NDN Kars.”

75 Author’s 2018 interview with Keith Secola.

76 Secola, “Fry Bread.”

77 Author’s 2018 interview with Keith Secola.

78 Ibid.

79 James Bryant, “State Secret: North Carolina and the Cherokee Trail of Tears,” Journal of American Indian Education 47, no. 2 (2008): 3-21.

80 Louis Owens, Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press 1998), 135-166.

81 Randy Woodley, Becoming Rooted: One Hundred Days of Reconnecting with Sacred Earth, (Augsburg Fortress: Broadleaf Books, 2022), 74.

82 L. Erdrich, The Chippewa Landscape of Louis Erdrich, (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999), 345.

83 Paula Gunn Allen, Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), 158.

84 Secola, “Fry Bread.”

85 Author’s 2018 interview with Keith Secola.

86 Ibid.

87 Ibid.

88 Author’s 2018 interview with Raye Zaragoza.

89 Secola, “NDN Kars”; Secola, “Fry Bread.”

90 Leila El Shennawy, “The Making of Fry Bread,” Reader’s Digest Canada, Feb. 5, 2024, https://www.readersdigest.ca/.

91 James J. Donahue, Contemporary Native Fiction: Toward a Narrative Poetics of Survivance (New York and London: Routledge, 2019), 4.

92 Michelle Raheja, Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty, and Representations of Native Americans in Film, (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press 2010), 200.

93 Secola, “NDN Kars”; Keith Secola, “Fry Bread.”

94 Drew Taylor, “Introduction,” in Me Funny, edited by Drew Taylor, 1-3 (Vancouver, Toronto and Berkeley: Douglas & McIntyre, 2005), 3.

95 Ian Ferguson, “How to be as Funny as an Indian,” in Me Funny, 123-132, 128.

96 Author’s 2018 interview with Keith Secola; R. Wells, Life Flows On in Endless Song: Folk Songs and American History, (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 8.

97 Przybylski, “Indigenizing the Mainstream,” 11.

98 Author’s 2018 interview with Keith Secola.

99 Vizenor, “Aesthetics of Survivance,” 1.

100 Author’s 2018 interview with Keith Secola.

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References

Electronic reference

William D. J. Rees, Comedy and Indigenous Survivance in the Music of Keith SecolaEuropean journal of American studies [Online], 20-2 | 2025, Online since 01 June 2025, connection on 06 June 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ejas/24338; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/14eis

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About the author

William D. J. Rees

Dr William D. J. Rees is a historian of twentieth-century American politics and culture. His scholarship discusses hippies, disco, decadence, and Native American pop music. Accomplishments of his include winning the British Association for American Studies Postgraduate Essay Prize and the British Association of Decadence Studies Essay Award. He is currently the early-career representative on the executive committee of the British Association for American Studies and enjoys a good cup of tea.

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The text only may be used under licence CC BY 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) may be subject to specific use terms.

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